{"id":22818,"date":"2011-09-27T08:05:49","date_gmt":"2011-09-27T12:05:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacingtoronto.ca\/?p=22818"},"modified":"2013-03-20T18:11:02","modified_gmt":"2013-03-20T22:11:02","slug":"no-mean-city-toronto-urban-design-awards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2011\/09\/27\/no-mean-city-toronto-urban-design-awards\/","title":{"rendered":"NO MEAN CITY: Toronto Urban Design Awards"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"60<\/p>\n

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Cross-posted from <\/em>No Mean City,<\/em><\/a> Alex’s personal blog on architecture<\/em><\/p>\n

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\n<\/em><\/p>\n

A night about design, and it turned into a civic pep rally. That was the Toronto Urban Design Awards ceremony last Monday night, when the city handed out prizes to the best buildings, landscapes and urban planning ideas of the past two years. After all the negativity of the Port Lands debate, and the silliness of Doug Ford\u2019s Wild Waterfront Kingdom, the awards showed just how much smart work is coming out of local designers – and what a smart job of city-building that the city of Toronto has been doing. PDF of winners here.<\/a><\/p>\n

Host Matt Galloway set the tone, and it was unceasingly enthusiastic. \u201cWe\u2019re too quick to run this city down, and other people are too quick to run this city down,\u201d he said. \u201cWe shouldn\u2019t let them.\u201d And he suggested the winning designs spoke to the potential of the city and the way it’s already, productively taking shape. The award winners included some truly great projects.<\/p>\n

One winner, the best midrise building, was 60 Richmond – a Jenga-like apartment tower by Teeple Architects that is remarkably creative and equally green. (I wrote about it last year here.<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Another, in the \u201clarge places\u201d category, was Sugar Beach on the waterfront, by Claude Cormier. (I\u2019ve had my say about that brilliant park, too, here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

You may notice that both of those were commissioned by city agencies: Toronto Community Housing, and yes, Waterfront Toronto.<\/p>\n

Both have gotten a bad rap in the past year, despite strong records of getting things done. <\/a>I hope this is a useful lesson for those on city council’s gravy-hunting wing.<\/p>\n

On a related note, the biggest applause of the night came with an award for the Fort York Cycle and Pedestrian Bridge, led by Montgomery Sisam. Yes, that’s the one that was planned, costed, bureaucratically okayed – and then killed at the last minute by a sneaky committee motion by Mayor Ford’s allies. It would have been a dramatic connection<\/a> between Fort York (a crucial site that has been, as the jury says, “brutally isolated” by infrastructure.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I hope it comes back, in some form.<\/p>\n

In a broader sense, these awards, given out every two years, mark a positive change this time in the city’s design culture. Robert Freedman, the city\u2019s director of urban design, puts it this way, and I agree. “Context” has been a watchword of the city’s best designers since the 1960s, and I am seeing a broadening influence of that idea – really a sensibility, blending contemporary gestures with a respect for what’s come before.<\/p>\n

Today, after many decades of design experimentation, we appear to be regaining a shared, city-design ethos. Over the past decade, Urban Design staff have been distilling these design values into a series of guidelines for various scales of structures from townhouses to tall buildings. We\u2019ve been pleased to see that more and more of the Award submissions appear to be following these guidelines. We also see fewer buildings and landscapes presented as stand-alone objects, with much more emphasis on context and the spaces between buildings. Good city design does emerge through individual efforts when we share a common sense of what constitutes good urban design.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted from No Mean City, Alex’s personal blog on architecture A night about design, and it turned into a civic pep rally. That was the Toronto Urban Design Awards ceremony last Monday night, when the city handed out prizes to the best buildings, landscapes and urban planning ideas of the past two years. After allContinue reading “NO MEAN CITY: Toronto Urban Design Awards”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4088,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[22,21759,33,47,20],"tags":[6296,174],"class_list":["post-22818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture","category-features","category-housing","category-parks","category-urban-design","tag-alex","tag-no-mean-city"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nNO MEAN CITY: Toronto Urban Design Awards - Spacing Toronto<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2011\/09\/27\/no-mean-city-toronto-urban-design-awards\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"NO MEAN CITY: Toronto Urban Design Awards - Spacing Toronto\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Cross-posted from No Mean City, Alex’s personal blog on architecture A night about design, and it turned into a civic pep rally. 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